Recalling I.D., a Beacon in Design

IT was by and large a jovial crowd that filled the back rooms of the Half King bar in Chelsea on Tuesday night, as a crush of former staff members, contributors and friends of I.D. magazine, the 56-year-old design bible that folded last month, gathered, ostensibly to mourn its passing. Though the evening was billed as a wake — its invitation was composed, appropriately, in a font called Requiem — the gestalt was more like a class reunion, a gaggle of bright former students who all seemed to like one another very much.

It is sometimes the case that employees of shuttered publications have a distorted sense of their magazines’ importance. When an underfinanced two-year-old city weekly went belly-up two decades ago, the wake was covered by The New York Times, and the weekly’s former staff members, including this reporter, were photographed by Dith Pran, a survivor of the Cambodian killing fields, after which an editor turned to Mr. Dith and said breathlessly, “After what you’ve been through, this must seem like nothing!” (Big wince.)

Still, I.D. really did matter, as a laboratory of ideas and a breeding ground for generations of designers and makers of all stripes. George Nelson was an early contributor;
John Gregory Dunne, an editor.
Andy Warhol illustrated a story about tractor design. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, once analyzed the design of pasta. Bruce Mau engineered a redesign of the magazine in the early 1990s, the decade in which it won five National Magazine awards, with Chee Pearlman, now an independent curator and consultant, as its editor in chief. On Tuesday, Ms. Pearlman was a den mother, brandishing her digital camera and herding staff members into grinning clinches.

Under Ms. Pearlman’s direction, everyday objects were analyzed for their elegance and utility, and, in photographs, given “the Hollywood celebrity portrait treatment,” as
Phil Patton, a longtime contributor, said Tuesday. (Mr. Patton once gathered up the plastic coffee cup lids that littered the floor of his car and dumped them on Ms. Pearlman’s desk. Et voilà! An article was born.)

Staff members blamed the current owners, F+W Media, rather than the economic climate, for their beloved magazine’s demise, suggesting that there had long been a philosophical disconnect between the culture of a Cincinnati-based company that published titles like Deer and Deer Hunting, and the Manhattan-centric I.D. (F+W bought the magazine about a decade ago, and temporarily moved its offices to Ohio.) In a statement about the magazine’s closing, the publisher cited a variety of reasons, including the downturn in print advertising. “At the end of the year,” David Blansfield, president of F+W Media, said, “we weren’t prepared to call a recovery.”

When Ralph Caplan, one of the first editors, took the mike that Ms. Pearlman had set up, his noting of the Cincinnati years was greeted with a hiss.

In fact, he said, that move remained “so upsetting to so many of us that things were only made right” on Sunday, when the New York Jets beat the Cincinnati Bengals.

(After he spoke, the evening’s unofficial M.C., Michael Bierut, a partner at the design firm Pentagram, endeavored largely unsuccessfully to adjust the microphone to fit the varying heights of the successive speakers. “A classic fallacy,” Mr. Patton said later, “turning to a graphic designer to solve a product-design problem.”)

Earlier, Mr. Caplan explained that money had always been tight at the magazine, recalling how he sent hungry actor friends to product introductions to retrieve the press kits.

“The actors had lots of time on their hands, looked good, were grateful for the free drinks and snacks, and I didn’t have to pay them,” he said proudly.

As the evening wound down, Jesse Ashlock, the magazine’s last editor, a job he held for seven months, remarked that this was his fifth layoff in a decade. (Mr. Ashlock is all of 32 years old.) For the next decade, he said: “My goal is to not break things, but make them. You don’t want to be called the Undertaker unless you’re in the World Wrestling Federation.”

He brightened up as he considered Mr. Caplan’s thrifty habits. “I once worked at Visionaire,” he said, referring to the precious fashion magazine. “And I know a lot of models. I could see redeploying them like Ralph did.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 7, 2010, on page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Recalling I.D., A Beacon in Design. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe